Macbook Pro Internal Hard Drive Upgrade 2009-11-07

I followed the ExtremeTech
guide
to
upgrading a MacBook Pro internal hard drive, and it went smoothly.
(The hard-drive retaining mechanism has changed since that article,
however. There is now a hold-down lever on the right side of the
drive, held in place by two screws.)

My Macbook Pro is over a year old, so voiding my warranty was not an
issue.

The new drive I chose (at Best Buy, where I got some excellent
product-choice input) was a 2.5" 500GB Seagate ``Momentus'' 7200 rpm,
and the old 200GB drive was placed in a RocketFish external enclosure.
The RocketFish enclosure is especially nice, in my opinion, and I will
love the Seagate drive if it lasts a long time. Already I can see
that it is quieter and a bit faster than the original drive. After
booting the Mac OS X Snow Leopard disk and ``erasing'' the new drive
(to format it), I was given the opportunity to load all my apps, user
directories, and settings from the external drive containing my old
system. This made the upgrade extremely painless, and I can't thank
the responsible Apple engineer enough for working that out so well.

One surprise, however, was that my Xcode installation did not get
copied over. (In contrast, all the MacPort stuff in /opt/local
was copied.) I discovered this when I noted make was
missing (which should be in /usr/bin). Thus, Xcode had to be
reinstalled from its .dmg file, unlike everything else.